Room with a Review

Years ago, I wrote about the board game Mysterium, an interesting cooperative game in which one player tries to lead the others in solving a mystery, using only the unusual artwork on a deck of cards. I liked the game, hoping it would get some repeat plays in my group. It didn't. Neither did Obscurio, a similar game that (in my view) sacrificed the smoothness of the original concept in trying to add a "hidden traitor" element.

Now I'm wondering if the third time's the charm with Rear Window. This is one of the newer games from Prospero Hall, a design studio that's found success with licensed games that are often more solid than the average licensed game. (Though it's a matter of personal taste, of course. The "take that" gameplay of their most successful line, Villainous, leaves me cold.) Rear Window feels like an odd choice: a game based on a nearly 70-year old movie? (Albeit, a pretty good one.) But the game both suits the theme well enough to make sense, and works completely independently of any knowledge of the film.

The players have four "days" (rounds) to crack a case. The "Director" player is the only one who knows the solution to the mystery: a specific layout of 4 characters (from 8 possible) and 4 traits (from 12 possible). Each day, the Director places eight illustrated cards into "window" slots that the "Watcher" players are spying on to gather information. The Watchers team uses tokens to guess what they think the 4 characters and 4 traits are; the Director then scores how many of the 8 tokens they've placed correctly. Anything less than perfect, and the game proceeds to the next day.

There are some small wrinkles in this to spice things up. The Director has 3 chances to discard any number of cards they're working with and draw replacements. The Director can also place up to 2 of their 8 window cards face down, to hide images that might only confuse the players. The Watchers can invoke the special powers of four movie characters, once per game for each, to zero in on particular information they'd like to confirm.

But there's also one interesting big wrinkle. When the Director is randomly setting up the mystery at the start of play, a "Murder" tile is mixed in with the 12 possible traits. If that tile ends up involved in the mystery, then the conditions of the game have secretly changed. Now the Director wants to deceive the Watchers... just the right amount. If at the end of the four days, the Watchers have guessed only 6 or 7 of the 8 answers correctly, and have failed to identify the slot where the "Murder" tile resides, then the Director alone wins the game. If the Watchers guess 7 or 8 of the tiles correctly and identify the correct slot of the Murder, they thwart the Director and win. And if there's too much confusion, with 5 or fewer answers guessed correctly -- nobody wins.

I've played a half dozen or so games of Rear Window so far (both as Director and on the Watcher team), and I feel like they really hit the sweet spot with this twist. About two-thirds of the time, it's a straight-up cooperative game. About one-third of the time, it's a head-to-head (head-to-team?) game... though you don't know it right out of the gate. It's a good balance to leave you wondering: "Are we being tricked, or is our Director having honest difficulties?" (They might be drawing bad cards, or not thinking about how to play them in the same way the Watchers do.)

The game can have a touch of the "quarterbacking" issues that many cooperative games have, with one player dominating the team discussion of strategy. That said, the ambiguity of the card illustrations, combined with the fact that there are 8 answers to get correct, does help enough (I think) to make room for input from everyone on the team at one point or another. I've enjoyed the game in both roles, and I've enjoyed it both with and without a Murder tile in play. (Though my group has yet to have a "Murder game" end in any way other than "everyone lost.")

I think maybe the game won't stick around for the long haul in my group; there are a few regular players who don't seem to care for it as much as I do. But I'd say it has a better chance than Mysterium or Obscurio ever did. And if it does stick around, there are clever variant tiles you can bring in that up the difficulty for Directors who have learned too-effective ways of communicating with their Watchers.

I give Rear Window a B+. It's a bit of an odd duck: competitive and cooperative, deductive and conceptual. But it's a soup of ingredients I personally happen to like, so I hope I get to play it more.